New AA Vacations promotion: Play a hand of Black Jack to receive bonus AAdvantage Miles offers and discounts from AA Vacations

American Airlines Vacations just launched a new promotion where you select a bonus offer and then play a hand of Black Jack to receive that offer. Here’s how the describe it in their press release:

To highlight the extension of its lowest price guarantee to its entire suite of travel products – including vacation packages – American Airlines today launched the “What’s The Deal?” online booking promotion. The promotion, which runs through Nov. 9, allows customers who book a package with American Airlines Vacations(sm) to choose from a variety of deals they can put toward their next trip.

To participate, customers simply need to visit www.AAVacations.com/promo, choose one of six available offers, and then go head-to-head with a virtual “dealer.” With the offers customers can:

• Get $75 off and earn 2,500 American Airlines AAdvantage bonus miles when booking their vacation package

• Get $50 off per person when booking their vacation package

• Receive a $25 nightly discount for a future hotel stay when booking their vacation package

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Comments

Thanks for the post! Thinking about applying the 5,000 bonus miles to an upcoming trip. Do you know – if I were to book through AA Vacations to get the extra 5K miles – would I be excluded from participating in the hotel points/quarterly promotion programs? (Since AA does not explicitly quote a hotel rate, just a total package rate… would this be treated as booking through a 3rd party website). And what’s your analysis of how good the 5K miles are? Worth it to forgo hotel points? Thanks for the advice!

Hi RL5, It may be that there are exceptions, but most hotel programs require you to book with them in order to earn points in their loyalty program. As for whether or not to forgo the hotel points, it depends upon the hotel and how many points. I’m a big fan of both Starwood and Hilton, and if I had to compare 5,000 Hilton points to 5,000 AAdvantage Miles, I’d try to think of a scenario in which I might want to use miles or points. For example, let say I wanted to spend an early December weekend in New York City, shopping and taking in the holiday lights:

1 Saturday night, advance reservation at the NYC Hilton in Times Square is $280 or about 50,000 points
1 Round-trip coach flight from DFW to LGA is $464 or 25,000 AAdvantage miles.

5,000 AAdvantage Miles (in this example) are worth about $92.80 in buying power.
5,000 Hilton Honors points are worth about $28.

So the AAdvantage Miles (in this case) give me the most return for my money, so I’d take the 5,000 miles. Of course you can use miles for upgrades on international flights and get a much higher return on your miles, and different hotels and destinations will also change that equation, so to answer your question it’s probably best for you to ask yourself how would you use the points/miles and how much buying power do they represent.